Consciousness and Literary Experiment English 86000 / Fall 2011 Professor Jason Tougaw

1. Consciousness and Literary Experiment English 86000 / Fall 2011 Professor Jason Tougaw David Lodge, William James, Vernon Mountcastle, Rita Carter, & Lisa Zunshine

2. How would you describe the writer’s audience? What are the writer’s motives with regard to this audience? Where would you position yourself relative to that audience? How would you evaluate the writer’s success relative to the goals you mentioned? What’s your favorite element of the text? Your least favorite? Did the text change the way you think in any way?

3. Metaphors for Consciousness (and the Mind) Descartes: Pully/ Dumb Waiter; Hydraulic system James Tilly Matthews: “Air Loom” machine controlled by a band of tiny French spies. James: Stream, Bird’s Flight 20th Century Cognitive Science: Computers Contemporary Philosophy and Neuroscience and Pop Culture and Everybody Else: Network / Web / Plastic (i.e., “plasticity”) Damasio: “movie in the brain”

6. Gerald Edelman, from Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (2004)

7. Illustration of the pineal gland’s position in the brain, from Descartes’s Treatise on Man (1664) E.T. as homunculus

8. Monism: Matter (including brains and bodies) and consciousness are the same thing. Materialism: The brain is all there is; everything we know about reality and ourselves must emerge from the 3 ½ pounds of flesh (neural and myelin cells,etc.) in our skulls. Dualism: The self, or soul, must originate from something other--higher, more intelligent, or more rational--than flesh.

9. Variations Monism: Identity, Panpsychism, Idealism Materialism: Behaviorialism, Identity, Emergence, Functionalism, Elimintivism (Dennett), Biological Naturalism (Searle) Dualism: Cartesian Dualism, Property Dualism (Chalmers), Emergence (Damasio), Functionalism, Biological Naturalism, Naturalistic Dualism (Chalmers)

11. Next, in a world of objects thus individualized by our mind’s selective industry, what is called our ‘experience’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention. (11) The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, ‘convergence of characters,’ . . . which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmonize with this. (12) --William James, “The Stream of Consciousness”

12. . . . [Reality as we experience it in this sense is a human creation; . . . all our experience is a human version of th world we inhabit. This version has two main sources: the human brain as it has evolved, and the interpretations carried by our cultures. . . . Thus, new areas of reality can be “revealed” or “created,” and these need not be limited to any one individual, but can, in certain interesting ways, be communicated, thus adding to the set of rules carried by the particular culture. --Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (qtd. in Zunshine, “What Is Cognitive Cultural Studies”) \